Month: October 2013

Bright eye catching color is often reserved for childhood pursuits with serious or even bland color left to the business suits of adulthood. But color lovers know it doesn’t have to be that way. Play time is for every age.

Take Dutch-Brazilian artist Rafaël Rozendaal. Rozendaal creates art websites with bold playful color. Each site has its own algorithms that shape, warp and animate fields of bubbly color. ‘If no yes,’ pictured above, flexes like a kaleidoscope as you slide your cursor across the surface of the website. The magenta pink and pale sky blue are shattered in to a window pane of mixing gradients.

Rozendaal’s site ‘Inner Doubts’ is a maze of trailing gradients, a rainbow that flows along the rectilinear sides and spare angles of a pathway that changes with every click. It is both soothing and a boiling pot of shifting color, a real treat of sumptuous color.

‘Everything Always Everywhere,’ above, is a hushed waterfall of blue gradients, falling forever through the screen. The calmest of all Rozendaal’s sites it’s reminiscent of ocean wave or falling rain noise generators in visual form. ‘Maybe What,’ below is another ode to blue and pink. The sharp triangles of color march to the right, becoming narrower all the time, until they slink off into infinity.

These pieces, built for an adult art world, take color and play seriously. The sites are an opportunity to get a dose of bright color and too remind yourself that color is one of our creative tools and can be enjoyed for its own sake. If you are having a gray day, have a look though Rozendaal’s sites. We promise a smile awaits.

If you were watching the Emmy’s this year you might have noticed an odd addition to the usual television shows up for awards. Breaking Bad of course won its weight in gold statues but so did Lizzie Bennett Diaries, the little web series that could. The Lizzie Bennett Diaries is a YouTube adaptation of Jane Austen’s well loved Pride and Prejudice. For the year it ran the show caught on with YouTube’s younger audiences and became a new way for people to interact with and re-imagine Austen’s classic.

What does this have to do with color? A new Austen adaptation was just launched by the makers of the Lizzie Bennett Diaries. The show, Emma Approved, has something subtle to teach us about color in the office. Offices, yes even real ones where you are not on camera all the time, are public spaces that become associated with you and your company, whether through face to face visits with clients or customers or just images you share online. Take Emma’s office in the show:

Just look at that beautiful set direction! Along with white and warm wood frames Emma’s office is painted a vibrant peach, a color which was most certainly chosen to accentuate her look on camera. We don’t often think of skin tone colors as options for painting our interior spaces but this specific color of peach seems to support all the faces that have appeared so far in the show.

So not only does this great color show off her her golden pink skin tone but it grounds the shows brand in a physical space. For everything from her logo, business cards, Pinterest boards, office space, website that color becomes her signature. Now this is not an invitation to start wearing all one color, painting your rooms all that color, making your cards and website and Facebook page all that one color, but to encourage you to think about how color can create a subtle thread of connection between your physical space, internet presence, and materials. And picking a color that looks great with your skin tone is just a bonus!